New release of MapStore 2 with theming support

we are pleased to announce a new release of MapStore 2, our flagship Open Source webgis product, which we have called 2017.02.00. The full list of changes for this release can be found here, but let us now concentrate on the latest most interesting additions.

Advanced Theming

The main Feature of this release is the possibility to have different themes, as shown in the Gallery below.

Default Theme

Console Theme – Home Page

Console Theme – Map

Console Theme – WFS Search

Console Theme – Search Results

Wasabi Theme – Home Page

Wasabi Theme – Map

Wasabi Theme – Search

Dark Theme – Home Page

GeoSolutions Theme – Home Page

MapStore 2 was conceived with the goal to be highly customizable, therefore we have worked hard on the look and feel from the beginning to create a product that would easily adapt to predefined graphical guidelines as well as a framework which could be easy to integrate with 3rd party applications.

With this release the goal has been achieved. We have refactored the original theme simplifying greatly the steps to create new themes and switch between them. You can try to switch it live from the home page, there is a specific combo with some predefined styles.

On the technical side, we have refactored MapStore 2 theme support using less, hence now creating your own theme to match your company’s visual design guidelines is very simple. We are developing an example that allows you to customize your theme directly from the web page, you can see it here below or test it here.

Balloon Tutorial

The balloon tutorial is now ready also with html support. You can try it live by clicking on “Tutorial” in the map’s burger menu, as an instance in this map.

Notes for Developers

This release has a number of changes that are crucial to know for the developers since they break compatibility with older versions. Here, you can find the details of what we updated and how to migrate your application.

We strongly believe that these changes will speed up the development and improve the quality and the readability of the code (particularly redux-observable). If you will find yourself struggling with these changes, reach out for us on the developer mailing list and we will help you out.

We also looked around for a tool to produce developers’ docs that would satisfy our needs in the longer term. We found in docma a great tool as it allows us to provide both generic guides as well as to document our components, plugins and JavaScript API inline using jsDoc + Markdown. You can find the current version of the developer documentation here.

Twitter Account

MapStore 2 has now its own twitter account which it is using to let us know how it feels as well as to share useful information and insights.

The main focus for the next release is the implementation of a JavaScript API to allow you to include MapStore 2 in your application or web-site and interact with it in more advanced ways than a simple IFRAME. We are also going to focus on the following items:

Improve developer’s documentation

Improve the management of Maps, in order to allow users to manage them also from the map itself

Better interaction with WFS

In the longer term, we have a number of features and functionalities in our plans like editing, advanced templating, styling, OAUTH 2.0, and more…